We’ve known for a while that Reagan committed treason during his 1980 election campaign, when he sent men to convince the Iranians not to release the American hostages. (Because the release of the hostages would of course have helped Carter get elected.)

This shows that Reagan’s treason was merely following the precedent of Nixon’s earlier treason.

Old Joe McCarthy, that many on the Right love so much, secured the release of Waffen SS soldiers convicted of participating in the Massacre of Malmedy (88 American soldiers exectued)during the Battle of the Bulge. McCarthy did so to win votes as his district was home to lots of American of German descent.

That would be like suspending the Harlem Globetrotters for playing fast and loose with the rules. The Democrats (rather their base) must lose to somebody, even when they “win,” so if the Republicans didn’t exist, they’d have to be invented.

Somehow, I don’t equate a contrived sports entertainment, in which everyone over the age of about eight knows the outcome, to be the equivalent of treason and the willful destruction of our poitical system. Neither the GOP’s history, nor your own example, has anything to do with “playing fast and lose with the rules”.

Well then, since this isn’t contrived, surely the people responsible for Iran-Contra and the Iraq War lies and torture and so on will be punished for breaking the law. Surely one set of rich and powerful people won’t just pardon another set.

Either that, or this is the political version of pro wrestling’s kayfabe.

LBJ and the fake “Gulf of Tonkin” incident. However, sabotaging peace talks that might have gotten America out of the war five or six years early… that is just downright traitorous. The former was might be a war crime, the latter is just…

Um. Vietnam was Kennedy, LBJ and Humphrey’s war. Like Korea was started on the Democrat Truman’s watch. Oh and worst war monger ever, Woodrow Wilson and his war to save the world thru democracy as sold to the American people by the originators of “manufactured consent”, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman. During that war hundreds of Germans were put in jail and the I.W.W. leaders too.
At one point I actually think the two teams had some strong convictions, but now all I see as mentioned above is kayfabe.

US involvement began even before the 1954 Geneva Accords that stopped the active war by France against Vietnamese forces. In the early 1950’s the US funded the French war to the tune of 90% — under the Administration of Eisenhower/Nixon — and refused to go along with the Geneva Accords. Kennedy ramped it up substantially & LBJ really jumped us in under the false pretense of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Nicaragua, Iran-Contra, the 1953 CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran; Iraq, Chile, our “activities” in Pakistan and Northern Africa, and our support of the “opposition” in Syria are all part of the same crazy thread — stretched and woven by both parties.

It’s all a dance of the Elites and Oligarchs — and the rest of us (the little people) are merely the “foam on the runway.”

In October 1963′ JFK issued secret NSAM 263 directing that US troops were to begin withdraw from VN beginning at the end of the year. This may be one of the reasons why he was killed. One of LBJ’s first acts was to rescind that NSAM.

Montanamaven: you haven’t gone far enough back. The US had some far, far worse warmongers than Wilson.

Look up Polk, who campaigned and won office on a platform of declaring war on everyone. And almost did so (he backed off on the planned war with the UK). And then of course there were the demented warmongers in South Carolina who started the Civil War.

MM: Kayfabe is not merely the word of the day, but of the decade. Awesome!

In professional wrestling, kayfabe (pronounced /ˈkeɪfeɪb/) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true,” specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or pre-determined nature. Kayfabe has also evolved to become a code word of sorts for maintaining this “reality” within the realm of the general public.[1] Kayfabe was long held as a closely guarded secret within the professional wrestling industry; however, with the advent of the Internet, it has evolved into an open secret in the industry that is generally only adhered to during shows.

Kayfabe is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks, in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on camera. Also, since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to the show’s success (see pop), one might compare kayfabe to the fourth wall, since there is hardly any conventional fourth wall to begin with.

So much better than “kabuki” or IMNSHO “Hasbara,” since its origin is in this country. See also here for discussionn of “breaking kayfabe”, and a general agreement that “kayfabe isn’t what it used to be” (much like my feeling that Obama doesn’t even care enough to fake it any more).

Oh, but surely this is the fault of those horrid, socialist unions! When I read stuff like this, I want to take people like Mike Shedlock and force them into slave labor in a Chinese coal mine.

America is doomed. Up until the internet and information age, this stuff was easily covered up. Today, the government and corporations have to openly rape, steal, lie, cheat, and install a stronger fascist system.

I doubt we’ll have a revolution. Americans are too fat, stupid, and lazy for that. Instead, we’ll have Big Brother, re-education camps, military service for malcontents, and debt.

Well, shoot open the coca cola machine, get some spare change, and call Washington, a trunk call. Ask to speak to the President of the United States. You don’t want to have to answer to the coca cola company.

Sorry, Dean Baker, your column today is just as absurd as Peralstein’s. You can’t separate economics from politics; that’s been the less of nearly 200 years of industrial capitalism. The idea that “capitalism” can’t be responsibile for the obsecene maldistribution of wealth in our society ignores that fact that capitalism celebrates the acquistion of wealth, which is then used to pervert the political system to ensure the acquisition and maintenace of still more wealth. As Karl Polya explained so well in The Great Transofrmation, you can’t have one without the other.

The “progressive capitalism” Baker touts should be recognized for what it really is–an understanding that economics can’t be separated from politics; that political systems have to meet basic needs of all citizens, which in a successful technologically adavnaced democractic society will be far more extensive than just subsistence aid; and therefore such societies and political systems will see beyond invidivudal wealth to recognize a legitimate national wealth that has to be used for the good of society as a whole, i.e., a commonwealth.

Gold bugs? Since the price of gold is heavily manipulated I don’t have any expectations of where it’s going.

By the way, the world’s central banks have been net buyers of gold themselves since 2009, so perhaps you should be ridiculing those such as the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of Russia who are buying massive quantities of gold with the paper they’re printing rather than the poor little individual investors who can only manage to scrape up an ounce or two from time to time now that physical gold is becoming incredibly scarce in the market.

When I step back and look at things from a distance, I can see that all this madness for currency units is a particular perversion of our species in this culture.

However the greater perversion is the feeling of hubris, the feeling that you know best how other people ought to be living their live–especially when you don’t even know your ownself. And that’s something that I see certain internet forums steeped in–the self righteous knowledge that you know what’s best for other people.

“However the greater perversion is the feeling of hubris, the feeling that you know best how other people ought to be living their lives”

“the self righteous knowledge that you know what’s best for other people. – JGordon

@JGordon… if this is an oblique reference to myself, please point out the offending passages.

Skippy… if using evidence is self righteous… using the fog is down right an act of divinity… and I’ll take the former over the latter any day. BTW human agency is your problem and not some inanimate object[a, isms and ologys steeped in the ignorance of the past are where you should gaze – ire. The fog can be extrapolated upon ad infini… until the sunlight burns it away… is it foggy much in Heavenston, IL.*? *IDK…

Gold has acted for a couple of hundred years as a leading indicator of trouble. Gold prices go up when there is risk or fear of trouble. When the trouble actually hits, the gold price crashes.

(This actually kind of makes sense if you think about it. The goldbugs all go “Aha! The currency has collapsed! Now I will use my gold to buy food!” The farmers go “Why would we want this shiny metal?” and the goldbugs find themselves selling the gold off cheaply.)

The article about Kraft links to another article about how PepsiCo used to add a flame retardant to Gatorade.

When I saw that Brominated Vegetable Oil, or BVO for short, was in my drink, I was shocked: as I soon learned, this is a chemical originally patented as a flame retardant in plastics and is now banned from food stuffs in Japan and Europe because of health concerns.

According to an article in Scientific American, BVO is added to 10% of sodas.

Gamers say they chug their fuel for the sugar and caffeine, but drinkers of Mountain Dew and some other citrus-flavored drinks are also getting a dose of a synthetic chemical called brominated vegetable oil, or BVO.

Patented by chemical companies as a flame retardant, and banned in food throughout Europe and Japan, BVO has been added to sodas for decades in North America. Now some scientists have a renewed interest in this little-known ingredient, found in 10 percent of sodas in the United States. […]

Wim Thielemans, a chemical engineer at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, said since the alternatives are already used in Europe “their performance must be acceptable, if not comparable, to the U.S.-used brominated systems.” That means “the main driver for not replacing them may be cost,” he said.

“It is a North American problem,” Vetter added. “In the E.U., BVO will never be permitted.”

When I was in high school, I used to drink 3+ cans of Mountain Dew a day; my friends and I joked that it must be healthy because it contains orange juice. Luckily, I gave it up long ago.

I was a fan of Moutain Dew in high school too. These days my soda of choice is Diet Coke (sticks tongue out at food purists!). For holidays I will splurge on the fancy brewed ginger ales such as Reed’s Jamaican Ginger Brew, yum! But I drink more seltzer than anything else… esp. with pomegranate flavoring.

‘Gold has not rallied anywhere near as much as I suspect the goldbugs anticipated.’

Like any other asset, gold does not necessarily react according to straightforward logic.

In nearly every recession, for instance, stocks begin to rise before the recession ends, while the news background is still awful. This is why few punters succeed in buying the low: it just ain’t logical.

Overreliance on logic is why the PhD eggheads on the FOMC are gonna smack the wall pretty soon, with their ‘print till you puke’ frat-boy antics.

And Japan makes or made 100% pure silver pieces (0.03% tolerance, or somethig like that), better than your .925 sterling, I recently learned. Apparently, in the 16th or 17th century, the worlds’ biggest silve mine, more productive than those in Mexico, was in a place in the Kansai region.

Noting new; after their 1954 defeat at dien bien phu the French were prepared to sign a peace and trade agreement with the Vietnamese; US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (son of a Presbyterian minister) personally scuttled the peace process based on his belief that no one should make a deal with godless communist.

Thanks for the Ravitch article on Rupert Murdoch and the Common Core. There is a huge educational industrial complex. Joel Klein, the former NYC chancellor of the Department of Education, is now working for…Murdoch, since 2010.

And naturally snagged some nice contracts. The privitization of the NYC public schools continues.

Klein was with NYC DOE when the City let the contract to Murdoch (“Wireless Generation”). A few minutes after he participated in letting that contract, he spun through the revolving door over to Wireless Generation as the man in chief (milking the NYC DOE contract).

Nice work if you can get it. It sure does not seem to require a high IQ.

Academic looting continues… Harvard, MIT thwart effort to cap overhead payments http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-thwart-effort-cap-overhead-payments/Ridc4YwDfkGlmWfUUJ0snI/story.htmlHarvard, MIT, and a coalition of other powerhouse research institutions have thwarted a reform proposal by the Obama administration to slash the amount of government research money each school receives for overhead costs. The result is that about $10 billion a year, roughly a quarter of the nation’s university research budget, will continue to be channeled into such things as administrative salaries and building depreciation instead of directly into scientific studies.

I’m unclear why you think this is just a blue state issue? The article was written by Boston.com, so of course they are going to highlight the universities in Massachusetts that opposed the cap. But the reality is that all universities take out roughly half of your grant money for unspecified “overhead” costs. So it’s not a blue state issue, it’s an any school with students/professors that are successful obtaining grants issue.

And while the one side of me thinks it’s absolute crap that they do this (I am an archaeologist – those overhead fees are sure as hell not contributing to the comparative collection that I have to BUILD MYSELF or to the decades if not centuries old lab space we use), the other side of me also sees that this is one area where schools can seek to regain some of the money they’ve lost as states have reduced their support of state schools (we’ll set aside the issue of ridiculous exploding administrative costs for now).

“See what a coward Obama is. His poll ratings are plunging, and so inconvenient confirmations of his fallen standing are verboten. See what became of Petition to kick Obama out of the Democratic Party (ifthethunderdontgetya)”

Wow! WH just disappeared the petition as a “violation of the terms of use bla bla bla.” Just Wow!

“We petition the Obama administration to: Kick Obama Out of the Democratic Party

President Obama’s continual demand to cut Social Security as part of the deficit deal even though Social Security does not add one penny to the deficit is a mark of a true, mindless Republican. As a lifelong Democrat I move that we kick Obama out of the Democratic Party.”

I got in on the ground floor and was the 13th signature. I can understand a no confidence vote of Obama not being welcome. I couldn’t find anything in the T&C for the petition site that justified removing it but the terms and conditions are–like the law and the Constitution–whatever the White House says they are. Nobody reads that fine print like the Bill of Rights in any event.

What the headline giveth the content taketh away. This is not “ends one in three marriages”, rather “30 per cent of those who had divorced or separated”. So it’s just a proportion of the divorces, and some unknown number of them haven’t even divorced. Plus, they questioned 2000 parents and the article doesn’t state how many of them are divorced or separated. They are forming conclusions about a subset of unstated size. Love to see the r square on that.

I thought they might be indexing fatigue with divorce rates, but these are self-reports. I’m having a hard time imagining who would blame their divorce on a crying baby. For almost all kids, the really exhausting phase tapers off after a few months.

How did we evolve night-crying babies? Wouldn’t that invite lions and tigers to check things out, not to mention other Homo Erectus trying to sleep in the same valley – I mean, they couldn’t just shut their windows?

I came to the conclusion that when baby cries in the night he/she needs to be held and comforted. So I got a comfortable rocking chair and whenever baby cried (after feeding and changing) we rocked the night away. Both of us learned to sleep while rocking. Great solution and we kept our sanity!

Worked for me. No getting up for the bottle either, since mom and nature provide all. Gotta say, though, the flame of passion takes a big hit.

The subject reminds me of an unsettling film I saw recently, “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, where a child who can’t bond with his mother later becomes a school shooter. It was difficult not to feel sympathy for the depressed mother coping with a crying baby, while also feeling she never truly tried to connect with her son. All her efforts to do so seemed like going through the motions.

I’m just making up an evolutionary just-so story here, always a dangerous thing, but maybe being caught on your own when you’re small is such a potential death sentence that it’s better to yell for mom to come quick than stay quiet?

Fawns stay quiet. They sit tight on their own and give their parents a chance to pick them up later. Perhaps the difference is in how scary or scared the parents are. This implies human babies learned to shout for mom when humans got scary, not scared.

Shamefully, it appears that the reason Peabody got the access it did was due to the influence of some persuasive LDS attorneys (attorneys who happened to be LDS, not attorneys for the LDS church):

“It was negotiated by prominent natural resources attorney John Sterling Boyden, who claimed to be representing the Hopi Tribe while actually on the payroll of Peabody.”

The LDS had had very good relations with the Hopi over the previous century, so they weren’t as suspicious about this sort of dirty business. Boyden and Peabody undid a lot of mutual cultural rapproachment.

As I understand it, the Hopi weren’t even organized with a representative or deliberative body with the authority to make the deal, so one had to be created by outside influence. Here’s LDS scholar Hugh Nibley on the issue:

“in 1965…When I got there, there was confusion and excitement; something had happened…Everyone was going to where the meeting of the Tribal Council had just been held. The Tribal Council was a creation of the BIA, compliant to the will of the powers of the East, whose authority the traditionalists had never recognized. They had just that day leased a tract of the sacred Black Mesa to the Peabody Coal Company. The company had generously offered to provide trailer houses for the entire tribe if they would move to Los Angeles. A more colossal culture gap could not be imagined.”

The Hopi have about the most amazing and vibrant culture I’ve ever heard of, and their pacifist leanings led them to live in about the most godforsaken place on earth where they would be left alone. But the modern world found things to covet about even their little bit of the Moenkopi Plateau.

Johnson breaking the law with the NSA, illegally discovering Nixon’s treason and saying nothing to cover his and the NSA’s own criminal actions. Wasn’t Johnson ultimately committing an act of treason through complicity as well?

And or all the other people from campaign personnel to US Senators and NSA who also said nothing while millions died needlessly. Are any of those people alive today? Shouldn’t they be prosecuted?

Pfizer Kingpin Gunned Down In Ongoing Prescription Drug Cartel Turf War http://www.theonion.com/articles/pfizer-kingpin-gunned-down-in-ongoing-prescription,31678/“The murder of El Loco is a direct result of the escalating struggle over supply routes and territory between Pfizer and the Squibbs,” said FBI spokesman Jeff Lyons, using the nickname given to the rival cartel’s operatives, who allegedly woke Cox up in the middle of the night and killed him in front of his wife and children. “From lipid-lowering agents like Crestor to hard diabetes drugs like Avandia, everybody’s using this stuff, some of them as young as 35 or 40. The market’s worth billions, and it’s a bloody business.”

Aww, did that bad, bad petition hurt widdle diddum’s feewings? Did the mean boys and girls make widdle diddums sad? Did they hurt widdle diddum’s self-esteem? That was so mean! Widdle diddums is a very good widdle diddums and Mommy loves him! Oh, I know, I know, my precious widdle diddums.

And that mean, mean petition that says,

A petition for independent investigation of President Barack Obama for crimes of concern to the international community including but not limited to:

– Acquiescence to torture in breach of the Convention Against Torture;

– Extrajudicial killing of protected persons in conflicts of a non-international character in Pakistan and Yemen;

– Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population in Pakistan;

– Enforced disappearance of persons in Somalia;

– Sending armed bands, groups, irregulars and mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against the state of Syria and constitute criminal aggression?

You just say to them real loud, Don’t bully me! And you march right up to nice Mrs. Pillay and she will make the mean boys and girls stop picking on you.

“hacker”?
I don’t think that word means what they think it means.
AT&T made private info available publicly.
Might as well send someone to jail for reading your
diary when you leave it on a bookshelf in the public library.

Well, Hiram, I read the article in your link and then I said to myself: “When is satire not satire?” I had to look up Wallison’s bio to see the answer which is: “When the author supports his own exaggerations and ridicules his own stupidity or vices without knowing he is doing it.”

The Swanson article is excellent. It is long, but how can it not be if it assesses the damage done by the Iraq war? Sociocide is the right word.
He takes Steve Pinker to task for that stupid Better Angels.. book and also Jared Diamond’s new book which, when reading a review, did remind me of Pinker’s.
This was in the footnotes– from Edward Herman on the use of the word “genocide”.
“Edward Herman, in a communication to me, points out that Pinker uses as “a source for mass deaths a rightwing nut like Rudolf Rummel but never cites Amartya Sen, who makes the case that mass deaths from built-in capitalist structures can exceed those of holocausts that Pinker and Rummel prefer (and inflate and misrepresent).”

I read that and thought it was bullsh*t.
1.4 million dead, 4.2 and 4.6 million injured or refugees, 10.2 million all told. In a population of 24 million. Not much short of half the population in other words.

No way, basically. To get those sorts of tolls, historically speaking, you need a long series of incredibly violent events. There were no massive battles, no vast population transfers, no long, bloody seiges ending in mass civilian slaughter. It wasn’t that kind of war.

I’m not saying it was pleasant, but it was nothing like as bad as they’re saying, in grand histroical terms.

How can Krauthammer even claim the Constitution does not apply outside US borders? We can claim US copyright extends to New Zealand and nab Kim Dotcom on (dubious claims of) transgressions against those copyrights.

Doesn’t the same apply to due process? Isn’t one of these more important than the other?

Oh Boy! Hilary’s really pushing the envelope with controversial positions — what a brave lady she is — courage of her convictions and all that.

I hope she gets swept off to a corner of Rubin’s Hamilton Institute to write about how she endorsed gay marriage and important stuff like that, while being perfectly a-ok with America vaporizing innocents to red mist on the whim of an Autocrat serving the Rich (like her).

Thanks for including the NYT article regarding gun rights vs orders of protection. As someone who has been threatened in a non-domestic stalking situation that included the threat of being shot, it’s important to have this discussion. Illinois has different types of OoP’s, including one for non-domestic situations like mine, but the police and legal system were completely useless to me last fall when I needed their help. The attorneys I spoke to wanted thousands of dollars up front to just file the OoP (which I could have done myself, but don’t think that is really a DIY kind of thing) and the police refused to do anything more than reluctantly file a report when I had to call 911 because they could have been sued by my stalker. The officers at the jail and courthouse refused to remove my stalker when they attended the sheriff’s sale and certification when I gave the house back to the bank because both locations were “public buildings.” I was also told that the non-domestic OoP’s are so far down the list of priorities that they couldn’t even give me an estimate of when it would have been served. I gave up fighting to save my home because of my stalker and am angry that the system that should have been there for me not only failed, but basically made it sound like I was overly hysterical and should be grateful that I was moving because well, gee, wouldn’t that solve the problem?

Just because the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, it should not prohibit the rest of us from imposing the restrictions and regulations necessary to keep us safe. My personal opinion is that we not only need owner registries, we should also close any loopholes regarding alternative methods of obtaining firearms, i.e. gun shows, internet sales, etc. I also believe that if someone owns a gun and threatens to shoot someone that they should immediately lose their license and have their guns confiscated with no hope of getting them back because sooner or later they will follow through on that threat!

The problem of the Maghrébins, immigrants to France from North Africa, has been around since shortly after WWII when they were invited into France to help rebuild the country. They comprise about 10% of the French population, if memory serves. It is unsurprising that many Maghrébins can’t integrate into French society while they are segregated into public housing ghettos, have few job opportunities, and are discriminated against. It is also unsurprising that with no incentive to integrate, an increasing number choose to become anti-assimulationist.

All this only gains visibility every few years when there is another particularly gratuitous police killing of a young Maghrébin for being in public and “beurre”, or when there is a social controversy, as with the wearing of a scarf or foulard at school, or when some of these ghettos blew up into rioting as they did a few years ago, or when, as now, there are bad economic times in France.

French racism differs from American racism in its targets. In France, for example, racism is often directed against those of North African descent and some Eastern Europeans and much less against those who came from “black” Africa.

And just as a side note to a reference in the article, French kings are not buried at St. Denis. They were buried there up until the revolution when all the bodies were thrown out and lost.